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Haredi leaders were afraid that if Jews were to free themselves from their anti-Semitic enemies in various European countries, the rank and file of European Jewry would turn their backs on Jewish religion, and the Haredi world would cease to exist. This did not happen. Haredi Jews never had it so good as they now have it in Israel, where their numbers reach well above one million.
During World War II, my maternal grandfather was given the opportunity, by members of the Jewish Agency, to save himself and the community he led from the approaching Romanian Fascists, aided and guided by the Nazis, who were about to catch up with the Jews of his town. The Jewish Agency people offered to smuggle him and others of his community out of Romania and into the soon-to-be-formed State of Israel. He refused. ”I would rather be with the Nazis," he said to them, "than with the Zionists." When the Fascists and the Nazis finally arrived at the gates of his town, he welcomed them with bread and salt, the way kings were once welcomed when entering a city. In response, they emptied their bullets on his head, took those of his children who were in town to the nearby Rut River, threw them into the water, making sure they drowned to death, then shot his wife, the mother of the drowned children. His daughter, my mother, never forgave the Zionists for the Nazis' crimes. Makes sense? No. Man's reality is rarely logic's best friend.
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